Grade expectations: the good, the bad and the ugly side of report cards

By Dilvin Yasa| 1 month ago

If ever there was confusion as to how I was doing in the classroom as a kid, I only needed to wait until my report card was sent home.

All these years later, I can still remember my parents poring over every single line and bellowing at me the way only immigrant parents banking on their kids making something of themselves and saving the whole family from a lifetime of working class misery could.

“WHAT IS THIS???” my mother would explode in the car park of the school, seemingly unable to walk the 50 metres to our house directly across the street before opening the envelope. “WHAT IS THESE SHEEEET?”

“Erm… it’s a B,” I would respond in a quiet voice, my head bowed and my tails between my legs as students and their parents rubbernecked as they walked past.

'I didn’t like receiving lower grades, but I appreciated knowing exactly where I stood.' (Supplied)

“Oh, I see, it’s a B, huh?” my mum would continue. “Well, I can’t even begin to tell you how pleased I am that I moved here to the other side of the planet to give you and your brothers a better life than I ever had, blah blah blah..." (it would go on for some time).

“But, that’s the only B in the report card,” I would stammer. “Everything else is an A or an A+….”

My mother never responded because her message was crystal clear: a single B pretty much declared everything else in that report null and void, thus limiting my future career options to sexing chickens and little else.

If you think my parents didn’t hold back, things were no less… blunt with my teachers. ‘Dilvin does not play well with others,’ my first report cards in primary school stated over and over again. ‘Dilvin’s effort – or lack thereof – in maths this year has been nothing short of disappointing’.

The report cards were full of emotion – some teachers expressing delight, others barely containing their frustration, yet even at that age I could see that each of my teachers had my number.

I didn’t like receiving lower grades (later on in high school when I gave up on chasing endless A grades and trying to please my parents), but I appreciated knowing exactly where I stood with everyone. I liked having my strengths and weaknesses spelled out for me, what I had to work on and what the brutal truth of my situation was at any given time.

To this day, I love nothing more than a person who calls a spade an effing shovel. As a parent in the current landscape, I have no such luck with my own daughter’s report cards.

I don’t know when they got rid of the old-school grading system of A through to F so our little snowflakes wouldn’t fall apart at the suggestion that they may not have a natural aptitude for a particular subject, but now everything is marked 5 or Outstanding Effort (basically an A) to a 1 or Limited Effort (a new wave F).

As far as I’m aware everyone - and I mean everyone – at my child’s school only ever seems to receive a long line of 3 or Satisfactory Effort.

It’s not the grading so much that I’m confused by however; it’s more the wishy-washy statements in each and every one of her subjects. Today, teachers are no longer allowed to express what they really think, instead relying on a bulk lot of statements that are as clear as mud.

In my daughter’s last report card, for example, I read she ‘recognises the purpose of data collection’, and ‘demonstrates sound achievement in the fundamental movement skills of sprint run, catch, vertical jump, skip and overarm throw’.

Does she suck at maths? Is she disruptive, disappointing, have a long future of sexing chickens ahead of her? What is she capable of? What isn’t she capable of? Should I be hiring a tutor and if so, in which subject?

I have no idea, because the report cards give me nothing but lollipops and rainbows. I often have to chase after her teachers to get the real story – the one they’re not allowed to put in print.

As The Sun-Herald reported this week, it seems the NSW Department of Education is currently consulting parents on what it could do to reform report cards to reflect the new focus on learning progression, and I’d like to put my hand up with a suggestion: could we just scrap this PC madness and bring back the 80s?

Not only would it help toughen up our kids, it would save us parents a lot of time and confusion.